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Showing posts from November, 2021

musical

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Musical Kamala Wijeratne Singing they went Those troops of youth Looking so smart In their green -brown uniforms Happy they were As they drummed with their hands And sang their songs And beat their boots in rhythm The truck trundled to the north Was it their youth That brought the mist to my eyes? Was it the unbroken melody That left me uneasy? I could not wipe off a picture That sprang before me and spread As the long convoy passed And the music in it faded A long line of caged parrots I saw one day in a pet shop: The green was fading from their feathers I knew their days were numbered I wanted to buy them all And let them fly Back to the greenwood to sing all day The trucks trundled to the north I pressed my eyelids Down over the smarting eyes The gods protect you I thought And also, those you meet Smart they looked Those troops of youths In their green -brown uniforms. Happy they seemed As they drummed their hands And sang their songs Their v...

MONUMENTS

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Monuments By Kamala Wijeratne The bus sweeps past the swinging trees And the road unwinds long and cold The chassis creaks with the load And jolts to a halt by the road.   The bus stops for a moment to load And I see the writing on the halt A wayside monument etched in gold. “IN MEMORY OF MY SON” I get a jolt.   The legend goes on, on every bus Stand a new name every time but The story’s old “To the hero who fell in the north Erected by Father, Mother and next of kin” More than a dozen names penetrated my mind. But I remember the one common to all “Bandara” master of the soil Sons of those who teased out paddy from this land They would have ploughed this soil Gathered the harvest at reaping time Followed their fathers with the paddy in bins And sat by the hearth for the new rice Served steaming and scented by a mother’s fond hands While the Koha sang on the erabadu trees.   The inscriptions hug the white walls And the bus swings in and out of...

A River

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A River In Madurai, city of temples and poets, who sang of cities and temples, every summer a river dries to a trickle in the sand, baring the sand ribs, straw and women's hair clogging the watergates at the rusty bars under the bridges with patches of repair all over them the wet stones glistening like sleepy crocodiles, the dry ones shaven water-buffaloes lounging in the sun The poets only sang of the floods. He was there for a day when they had the floods. People everywhere talked of the inches rising, of the precise number of cobbled steps run over by the water, rising on the bathing places, and the way it carried off three village houses, one pregnant woman and a couple of cows named Gopi and Brinda as usual. The new poets still quoted the old poets, but no one spoke in verse of the pregnant woman drowned, with perhaps twins in her, kicking at blank walls even before birth. He said: the river has water enough to be poetic about only once...